Obama Gaffes Multiply
27 May 2008 3:53 pm by Taylor Marsh
BY TAYLOR MARSH
Three Pinocchios from the Washington Post. The good news? They had given him four.
“I had an uncle who was one of the, um, who was part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps. And the story in our family is that when he came home he just went up in the attic and he didn’t leave the house for six months.”
–Barack Obama, Memorial Day speech, Las Cruces, NM.
…and people wonder why Senator Obama isn’t garnering raves from the Jewish community. They don’t know him well enough to give this a pass.
I talked about this on my show, but didn’t say much because I hadn’t looked at Obama’s statement closely enough. Now I have. The Red Army were the liberators. Obama also doesn’t have an uncle. It evidently was his great uncle. However, getting the concentration camp wrong reveals a lack of sensitivity to an issue and a community that doesn’t know Senator Obama well in the first place. Let’s just say it’s not helpful.
But should we not expect more from a Harvard-educated presidential candidate? Is it too much to ask that an aspiring commander-in-chief knows (1) that Auschwitz (like many of the other Nazi death camps) is in Poland, and (2) that the eastern advance of the U.S. Army in World War II stopped on the river Elbe?
We’ve been here before.
It’s not like Senator Obama has a lot of credibility on national security issues to begin with.
